The Australian Society of Intellectual Disability (ASID) 50th Annual Melbourne conference took place in Melbourne, 10-13 November. annecto were sponsors of the event, and made live captioning possible for all keynote speakers over the course of the conference. We had members of staff involved in the preparation and organising of the conference under the Participation Sub-committee, together with other organisations such as Golden City Support Services and SARU.
This saw an online app being developed together with www.zeetings.com to allow participants with disability to interact at the conference on assistive technology. Each day a series of questions relating to the keynote presentations were published online with over 380 votes gathered over the three days. The zeetings software focuses on mainstream universal design with a frictionless experience for everyone.
This helped contribute to the broader conference goals of transfering knowledge from theory to practice, and finding ways for people with disability to influence policy. annecto also presented two posters during the conference. One poster explained how the successful partnership between TAC, Summer Foundation and annecto helped to make possible independent living possible for six people with high complex and physical support needs, and some with acquired brain injury, in their own apartments in Inner Melbourne. The second poster outlined the research we completed as part of the conference looking at the many different ways people with disability can participate in events such as this.
annecto also helped to create an online video channel for people with intellectual disability to share their stories and experiences through out the conference. You can see some of these videos on the ASID website.
See program details for the ASID 50th Annual Conference, read more about the learnings from the Abbottsford Housing, Technology and Support Model and see how annecto are calling for the housing sector to get on board and create opportunities for people with disability to live in their own home.
